Omelette and a Glass of Wine (49 page)

So far as one knows, Miss Acton and Mrs Beeton never met. Isabella would have been only nine years old when
Modern Cookery
was published. By the time
Household Management
appeared Miss Acton was dead.

It is ironic that almost the only part of Mrs Beeton’s original book which remained constant, whatever the other changes made in the successive editions, was that system of setting out the recipes which she had adapted from Miss Acton.

For twenty years, Ward, Lock left
Household Management
more or less alone to sell itself, simply bringing out, in 1869, and with Sam Beeton’s co-operation, a new edition with minor revisions and additions – mainly in the non-cookery sections of the work. About half a dozen different abridged volumes of Mrs Beeton’s cookery instructions and recipes were also launched on the market. These ranged from
Mrs Beeton’s Every Day Cookery and Housekeeping Book
at 3s. 6d. down to
Beeton’s Penny Cookery Book
which comprised ‘Recipes for Good Breakfasts, Dinners and Suppers at a cost varying from Ten Pence to Two Shillings a Day for Six Persons’. Before long, every category of literate household in the land was catered for by one or other of the Beeton cookery books.

In 1888 appeared a new and much revised edition of
Household Management.
It contained over sixteen hundred crammed pages –
the original had been eleven hundred odd – and the claim made for it was that it provided
all of Mrs Beeton
and a lot more besides. This was not strictly true. A number of Mrs Beeton’s original instructions had been curtailed, and others, less sound, substituted – the piece on the household stock-pot was particularly scarifying – written, one suspects, by a lady journalist specializing in domestic matters other than cookery.

Most of the recipes were now given French as well as English titles, for in spite of her sound knowledge of the language, Mrs Beeton had evidently not thought it necessary to supply French names for her English dishes. Ward, Lock kitchen French, with its latest and most remarkable flowering of 1960 was not Isabella Beeton’s invention.

In the 1888 edition also appeared for the first time those sections on foreign dishes with recipes so unconvincing and anglicized that they must, I think, be held at least partly responsible for the muddled ideas about continental cookery held by generations of English housewives and their not very good plain cooks. ‘Mrs Beeton says so, so it must be right.’ But Mrs Beeton had not said so, and her personality and beliefs were no longer quite clearly defined in the book which now bore her name. Gentility and suburban refinement had crept in; they were the keynotes of the colour plates of truly astonishing late Victorian china and glass, table decorations and furniture. An illuminating piece of English domestic taste, this 1888 edition. It was the period of Japonaiserie run to raging chaos, of tiered bamboo tables and
jardinières
, of octagonal teapots and porcelain sardine boxes encrusted with plum blossom, lovebirds and chrysanthemums.

In 1906, all change again. This time it was a professional chef, C. Herman Senn, who was employed to re-edit the cookery sections. This edition was a completely revised one. It was a volume of over two thousand pages, weighing about six pounds.

Handsomely printed, on heavy paper, the book now had new colour plates of a very high standard of printing and colour processing. They were also very pretty. Some of them showed elegant and wonderfully festive Edwardian tables. Draped with fine linen, loaded with flowers, ice-pails, and red-shaded candles and festooned with garlands, not a living soul could have found room to sit down at them. But how rich and bright they now appear to us.

And here for the first time too were the plates demonstrating the art of setting an invalid tray. On crisp white hemstitched cloths we
see the plated toast racks and crystal butter dishes, the starched napkins and tall
cloisonné
vases – two to a tray – filled with swaying roses and carnations, the engraved-glass tumblers, the befrilled cutlets, the whirls of creamed potato, the neatly rolled little omelettes and the individual creams and jellies which have become almost symbolic of a dream world of lovely willowy women, wax pale in lilac silk tea gowns, far too frail to descend to the dining room for dinner. (As a matter of fact they would have had to have been pretty brawny to balance one of those trays on their knees.)

Herman Senn, who had been chef at the Reform Club and subsequently adviser to the Food and Cookery Association, had written many cookery books of his own. He now proceeded to recreate an image of Mrs Beeton as the most
recherché
and extravagant of cooks. On to her down-to-earth housewife’s recipes hegrafted his own brand of Edwardian professionalism adding masses of refined little things in dariole moulds, any amount of aspic jelly and truffles, cream puddings, iced soufflés, mousses, jellies and gâteaux galore. Senn also enlarged the section of American and colonial dishes first introduced in the 1888 edition and which included the famous Australian recipe so often attributed to Mrs Beeton herself. Fish Klosh (½ a lb. of cold Trumpeter), Baked Flathead, Parrot Pie (1 dozen paraqueets) and roast Wallaby are jokes trotted out whenever anyone wants a little fun at Mrs Beeton’s expense. And there are plenty of other laughable little items which may very well have been responsible for some characteristic beliefs and habits of English cooks. The statement for example that ‘as regards the food of the upper classes the cookery of France is now almost identical with that of England’, the instructions to make coffee with 1 tablespoon to the half-pint of water, the assertion that ‘Parmesan is … usually made with goat’s milk’, the recipe in which scallops are boiled for an hour…

Nevertheless the 1906
Mrs Beeton
was a wonderful and beautiful book and is still greatly beloved by any one lucky enough to possess it. And any cook or housewife who wanted traditional English household cookery and sound, reliable cakes and pies and puddings could still needle out a certain number of the good old recipes from the mass of frills and fantasies supplied by Herman Senn.

Because, for all his faults – and today it is easy enough to pick holes – Senn was a fine editor. The 1906 edition may not have been Mrs Beeton, but it added up to a coherent whole. And it completely established the legend of Mrs Beeton’s omnipotence in kitchen
matters. Right on into the nineteen-thirties, by which time scarcely anything of the original work remained, it was still possible for the publishers to let the reader infer that Mrs Beeton was still alive and co-operating with the revision of her work. The note by Sam Beeton (he himself died in 1877) appended to the prefaces of the 1869 and 1888 editions in which he referred to ‘my late wife’ was expunged from the 1906, never again to re-appear.

Not in the skilfully-worded prefaces, not in the publisher’s notes, not in the quotes from famous writers, not even in a comment by Sir Mayson Beeton (the son after whose birth she died) about his mother’s work, was she ever referred to as ‘the late’ Mrs Beeton. The image of a formidable old dragon in black silk and white bonnet, still telling us to be up betimes, to wash up as we go along and not to chatter about trivial household affairs, still presided over thousands of English kitchens.

A century has passed since the first appearance of
Household Management.
The publishers have had no alternative but to admit that Mrs Beeton herself has now been replaced by fifty-five trained and experienced domestic experts.

It was scarcely to be expected that the work turned out by such a team, lacking one master guiding spirit, would have anything like the personality and vitality of that produced by one young woman possessed of a burning conviction of what should be said and the ability to say it in clear and unmistakable terms.

I do not propose here to write the obituary of
Household Management.
The editors and publishers have done that for themselves.

In vain one looks for some small sign of the historical sense which might have infused life into this mammoth volume. But the publishing house which so largely created the Mrs Beeton legend have utterly muffed their chance of showing the public and more especially students of cookery and domestic history how that legend originated and grew.

In their 1960 volume of one thousand three hundred and forty-four 9½ by 6½ inch pages the publishers who have found Mrs Beeton’s name such a steady source of income for ninety-three years have not even thought to reproduce one single one of those original recipes which, whether we, or they, or the editors like them or not, belong irrevocably to the history of English cookery. The omission is hard to forgive.

Wine and Food. Spring 1961

The above article was written at André Simon’s request, to celebrate the centenary of the publication in book form of
Household Management.
At the time, as I complained, Mrs Beeton’s original recipes were out of reach of the general public. About four years later, however, Messrs. Jonathan Cape, more imaginative than Messrs. Ward Lock brought out a facsimile edition of the 1861
Household Management
which then became cheaply available to all. Copies may still be bought from Prospect Books of 45 Lamont Road London SW 10.

Index

Page numbers in bold type refer to recipes, or to passages in which recipes occur

Acton, Eliza

English Bread Book
,
136

Modern Cookery for Private Familes
,
10
,
35
–
6
,
245
,
303
,
305

Adair, Robin,
165
–
6
,
170
–
74
passim

Adrian, Leslie,
10

aïoli
,
259
–
60

Alba, truffles of,
14
,
280
–
83

albóndigas
,
95

Alexandria,
23
,
159

Alfarella, La,
94
–
5
,
97

Ali Baba
,
184
–
5

almond and mulberry dish,
248

shortbread,
245
–
6

alose à l’oseille
,
64

American food,
137
–
9
,
145
–
6
,
159
,
231

Amory, G.,
112

Anacapri,
113
,
214

anchovies,
99
–
100
,
128

anchovy butter,
168

Andrieu, Pierre:
Fine Bouche
(review),
143
,
145

anisette liqueur, with fish,
190
–
92

Apicius,
183
,
184

Appert, François
275

apples

baked,
34
,
36

Bramley,
34
–
7

codlings,
242

Cox’s orange pippins,
34
–
5
,
105

with game,
34
–
5

with honey and cumin,
184
,
185

with lemon and cinnamon,
105

purée,
35
–
6
,
37

sauce,
35
–
6
,
37

trifle,
240

varieties for cooking,
34
–
7

apricot fool,
244

apricots, dried,
244

Arbroath smokies,
217
–
18

artichauts Escoffier,
61

artichokes (globe),
61
–
2
,
71

Asher, Gerald,
84
–
5
,
93

asparagus,
209n
.

wild,
107
–
8
,
111
,
112

Aurillac cheese market,
271
–
2

Australian food,
307

Austrian food, Norman Douglas on,
132
–
3